Print shops are typically medium or large scale facilities capable of supplying printing services for large institutions. For example, a print shop may be used by a bank or hospital to print documents for mass-mailing, such as bills, credit card statements, insurance reports, etc. A print shop may therefore handle large print jobs containing hundreds or thousands of documents, and each document may include one or more pages with private or sensitive information which is intended for delivery to a particular customer.
The print shop may include a centralized server that coordinates activity of a number of high-volume printers as well as other devices that prepare the documents for printing and delivery. The server may process print data in an encoded stream (e.g., Page Description Language (PDL)) where the format of each page is described in a sequential order and the data for each page includes the resources, or references to the resources, used to print the data for that page. Print data structured in this manner is useful for high-speed printing because it enables a printer to begin printing as soon as it receives data for the first page and continue printing page-by-page without first processing data located at the end of the print data stream.
Occasionally, one of the preparation activities managed by the server may inadvertently add or remove a page from the print job prior to printing. For example, a pre-flight activity may sometimes insert/delete an object from print data that describes a logical page. This can be problematic because, while the the format of print data used in a print shop is useful for high-speed printing, it does not provide a structure for mapping logical pages to a particular document or sheetside after the print job has been created. Thus, the inadvertently inserted/removed pages may shift in the print job and cause the print engine to produce a document that includes a page which is intended for a different document/customer. As a result, the wrong page or customer information may be printed and mailed to a customer, leading to print waste and potentially fines and privacy violations such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) violations.